Saturday 9 June 2001 21.17 EDT
First published on Saturday 9 June 2001 21.17 EDT

The Ballad of Sylvia and TedEmma TennantMainstream £12.99, pp176

It sounds a terrible idea. And in many ways, that's just the way it stays, but rather like the off-colour musical Springtime for Hitler in Mel Brooks's film, The Producers, there is something unexpectedly compelling about Emma Tennant's hyper-lyrical take on the tortured marriage between Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes.

By sheer force of eccentricity, Tennant rises just above the tastelessness of her decision to reimagine the turbulent marital life of the man who was later to become her own lover. Only two years ago, she was pilloried for including an account of her adulterous relationship with the former poet laureate in the most recent volume of her memoirs, Burnt Diaries. Not at all warned off, however, Tennant's imagination has once again been pulled back to the subject of Hughes and his alleged cruelty towards women.

This time, the author can have had no doubts that publication would bring condemnation raining down upon her head. Maybe, as some critics have implied, she simply understood the market value of this story in the wake of the huge commercial success of Birthday Letters, Hughes's poetic elegy for Plath. Yet the tone of The Ballad of Sylvia and Ted is pantingly passionate rather than venal. It reads like a lurid dream and has none of the tell-tale, plodding rhythm of a book which has been written solely with the bank balance in view.

There are a number of dark corners of Hughes's life into which Tennant has decided to apply her Technicolor palette. Among the dramatic high points is the mildly sensational suggestion that Hughes and his new lover, Assia Wevill, both turned up at Plath's London flat late on the eve of her death in 1963.

We witness the final scenes of the young American's life through the eyes of a bystander. 'Mr Hughes goes up the stairs fast with the dramatic black scarf streaming behind him,' observes the nosy professor who lived downstairs, and who had to take the next two days off work in order to recover from the gas fumes he inhaled that night through the floorboards. Plath killed herself in her kitchen by putting her head inside the oven.

Tennant's treatment of the tragedy is, she has said, a mix of fact and fiction. It is hard, though, for the reader to leave it at that, especially when so many of her passages make such big interpretive leaps, and when the author has also claimed that each page has been carefully elaborated around nuggets of information gathered over the years from several close friends of the key protagonists. Fuelled by these recollections, Tennant goes on to hint at the idea that Plath had taken a lover herself towards the end of her life, or at least that she was doing her best to make her errant husband as jealous as she could. There is also an indication that Plath's suicide may well have been precipitated by the discovery that her rival, Wevill, was carrying Hughes's child. She had an abortion at the time Plath was deciding to end her life.

The trouble is that Tennant's attitude to the truth is intentionally subversive. Her version of the build-up to these well-known events is a highly personal one and she makes no pretence at historical scholarship. In fact, in spite of its supposedly poetic form, the book has the tone of someone who has been waiting to get a lot of weighty gossip off her chest once and for all.

Taken on these terms, it seems quite a genuine enterprise compared with many of the pseudo-academic efforts of celebrity biographers such as Albert Goldman. Tennant may be catering to the same appetite for intimate revelations about the lives of the famous, but at least she does it with some emotional commitment. The personality of Assia Wevill, for instance, is painted with a respectful sense of mystery.

We are told she had: 'A secret Talmudic Eastern face, made to be half-hidden, but brazen when it emerges from the shadow or the smoke.' Wevill was a beautiful and self-assured advertising executive at J. Walter Thompson, we learn, before she was lured into a deadly sexual game by the predatory Hughes. It was a game she could never win. Six years later she, too, had killed herself, taking with her Shura, her young daughter by Hughes.

By the close of Tennant's extremely sad 'song', there are three principal arguments for letting the author off the hook. First, much of the writing has the endearing quirkiness of having sprung from a truly unconventional mind. Second, the odd and detailed imagery keeps the story rolling along. And third, it is obvious that Tennant has put a lot of her own bleak feelings about love and life into her portrait of the vulnerable figures of both Plath and Wevill.

Perhaps it is because Tennant knew some of the central characters, or because she remembers the intensity of her own brief encounter with Hughes, but there is a naive honesty and pain about this novel, misguided though the original idea might have been.